Monday, February 25, 2013

Daniel Day-Lewis wins Best Actor, as expected for his portrayal of Abe Lincoln in "Lincoln." Lewis cracks a joke in his acceptance speech, saying he was supposed to be cast as Margaret Thatcher and presenter Meryl Streep was the first choice for Lincoln. "Meryl Streep was Steven's first choice to play Lincoln... I'd like to see that version," Lewis says.

Jake Gyllenhaal hangs out on the set of his upcoming film Prisoners on January 20 in Conyers, Georgia

Denis Villeneuve directs the film from an original screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski (“Contraband”). Villeneuve is supported by a top-flight creative team that includes 10-time Oscar®-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins (“Skyfall”), Oscar®-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette (“The Young Victoria”), Oscar®-winning editor Joel Cox (“Unforgiven”), editor Gary Roach (“J. Edgar”), and costume designer Renée April (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”).

Alcon Entertainment’s PRISONERS is scheduled for release on September 20, 2013, and will be distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. Source: www.wearemoviegeeks.com

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The lead actors selected for the ﬁlm were all relatively unknown players from the American B-movie circuit. Ulmer had already worked together with Tom Neal, ‘a poor man’s Clark Gable’, on Club Havana (1945), one of his ﬂy-by-night melodramas for PRC. With the handsome looks of an ex-boxer and a preternatural capacity for sulking, Neal was cast in the role of sad sack Al Roberts, a talented New York pianist who, in his desperate attempt to reach his ﬁancée in Los Angeles, gets dealt a bad hand a couple of times over.

In the more critical role of Vera, Al’s acid-tongued nemesis, a thoroughly downand-out dame who ﬁendishly drops into the picture midway and keeps things in a headlock until her unceremonious exit, a feisty actress with a curiously apt nom de guerre, Ann Savage (née Bernice Maxine Lyon), was cast. Savage and Neal had previously played opposite each other in a few Bs for Columbia – William Castle’s Klondike Kate (1943), Lew Landers’s Two-Man Submarine (1944) and Herman Rotsten’s The Unwritten Code (1944) – and the two had an established screen chemistry and a bit of history, both on and off screen. (While shooting their ﬁrst ﬁlm together in 1943, Neal purportedly wasted no time overstepping the boundaries of professionalism, making an untoward pass at Savage by burying his tongue deep in her ear; she is said to have rewarded him with a prompt grazing of her knuckles across his face.

Ann Savage was brought in to see Ulmer on the set of Club Havana, with just over a week left before the shooting of Detour began; after a quick once-over, she immediately fell into favour with the director.

In a considerable departure from Goldsmith’s novel, the tale is told exclusively from Al Roberts’s perspective. Roberts serves as the ﬁlm’s narrator – delivering half his lines in a pained, edgy voice-over whose primary task, beyond recounting his life as a cursed nightclub pianist and a cursed hitchhiker, is explaining the inexplicable, proving to himself, as well as to the audience, that he is essentially powerless in his losing battle against fate. The story of Al Roberts begins where it ends: on the open highway. Seated at the counter of a Nevada diner, in a tableau that evokes the canvas of Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks, Roberts cries into his coffee mug. The tale he tells, whittled down from Goldsmith’s oversized script, is one of loss, with a tragic core that intensiﬁes as the human wreckage piles up all around him until he is no longer able to ﬁnd a way out. Source: www.palgrave.com

Saturday, February 16, 2013

I could have filled my entire top five with Jimmy Stewart's various lip-locks (The Philadelphia Story, Vertigo, Come Live with Me, Rear Window.) He was said to be nervous about filming this particular kiss, his first since returning to Hollywood after the war. The resulting embrace was so passionate that it raised eyebrows at the censor's office and ended up partially cut. Modern audiences might scorn at this momentary meeting of mouths (and the preceding lady-shaking) but the tension between Stewart and Reed cements it firmly in my list.

From Here to Eternity (1953) directed by Fred Zinnemann

Up there with the most iconic movie moments of all time, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's extramarital frolics in the surf left 1950s audiences hot under their collars. Supposedly many prints of the film ended up missing parts of the infamous scene owing to projectionists taking the cells home as souvenirs. Seeing it on the big screen for the first time last week, it struck me just how out of place their lack of inhibitions seem for a film of that period and it certainly hasn't lost any heat in the 60 years since its release. Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Tamsin Egerton and Josh Hartnett in SoHo, New York, on September 10, 2012

Hunky actor Josh Hartnett has reportedly moved on from ex-girlfriend Amanda Seyfried with another leggy blonde actress, his Singularity co-star Tamsin Egerton. According to US weekly Life & Style, Hartnett recently flew the 23-year-old St. Trinian's star over to the US for his birthday bash at the Icehouse restaurant in his hometown of Minneapolis. 'Josh doesn't usually bring his girlfriends home so this one must be special. He's really into Tamsin,' a source told the magazine. Source: www.marieclaire.co.uk

Love Hurts: Winterbottom’s Biopic a By-the-Numbers Look at London’s Infamous King of Soho - Michael Winterbottom continues on with his whirlwind filmography, unleashing one of his most standard projects in years, The Look of Love, a biopic on the rise of Paul Raymond, coined the King of Soho for his elevation of adult entertainment out of the gutter and into the public imagination. A trailblazer in Britain’s history as far as censorship and heterosexual nudity goes, there’s no doubt that Raymond is indeed a prolific figure and his personal life has just enough tragedy to make for a doable life and times treatment. However, once we’re given a few telling details about Raymond, his profession, and the three most important women in his personal life, it’s not hard to predict how Raymond and his ladies all eventually end up. Source: www.ioncinema.com

Raymond brags about his wealth -- telling everyone at his daughter’s wedding how much it cost, for instance -- and is a terrible name-dropper (“I’m friends with all the Beatles, except Yoko Ono of course.”) He sleeps with half his models, sometimes several of them at a time.

Yet Raymond failed to hold on to the three women he cared about. His first wife Jean, played by Anna Friel, won the biggest divorce settlement in the U.K. after he abandoned her for one of his performers. Fiona Richmond (leggy Tamsin Egerton) left to lead a “normal life” after seven years. Source: www.bloomberg.com

Thursday, February 14, 2013

"From Blue Valentine I kept my wedding ring. I kept it on actually for… a while… After the shooting had stopped I was still wearing it, I couldn't quite take it off. And now I keep it above the kitchen sink where I do dishes as a little memento - I kept that."

William's famously set up home with her co-star Ryan Gosling for three months at the director's behest, so that the pair could convincingly play a couple falling in and then out of love. And just to make us feel even more envious than we ever imagined possible, she confirms in the print interview that "he was a pretty good husband, I have to say! He was always doing the dishes and I said, Ryan, I don't think that's realistic. And he was like, I know, but Michelle, you go home and do the dishes, I'm not going to make you do the dishes here too!" Source: fashion.telegraph.co.uk

Monday, February 11, 2013

Holliday Grainger and Emile Hirsch will play the infamous bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Bonnie & Clyde, Lifetime/History’s four-hour miniseries directed by Oscar-nominated helmer Bruce Beresford and produced by Sony Pictures TV and Craig Zadan and Meron’s Storyline Entertainment. They join Oscar winners Holly Hunter and William Hurt, who were recently cast in the project.

Emile Hirsch will play Clyde Barrow

Written by John Rice and Joe Batteer, the mini is based on the true story of Clyde Barrow (Hirsch), a charismatic convicted armed robber who sweeps Bonnie Parker (Grainger), an impressionable, petite, small-town waitress, off her feet, and the two embark on one one of most infamous bank-robbing sprees in history. Hunter will play Bonnie’s mother Emma Parker; Hurt plays Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger credited with tracking down and killing Bonnie and Clyde. Source: www.deadline.com

“Don Giovanni” runs Friday evening and Sunday afternoon in the Brown Theater. Directed by Kristine McIntyre, this production updates the staging with a set and costumes inspired by 1950s film noir. “Here we find a morally corrupted antihero, an emotionally scarred femme fatale, and a conclusion that is destined to come but resolves nothing for those who remain standing," says Roth. "Add an inescapable past of the antihero plus an urban setting in the darkest hour of night and you have basically film noir.” To fans of film noir, that rings a bell. The Louisville Film Society partners with the opera Wednesday night with a film noir double feature at the Dreamland Film Center (810 East Market St.).

The double feature spotlights the Bonnie and Clyde-style "couple on the run" subgenre, with Nicholas Ray's seminal 1948 film "They Live By Night" and Joseph H. Lewis's "Gun Crazy," a 1950 melodrama about a World War II veteran and a carnival sharpshooter who embark on a crime spree.

The dramatic black and white tones of noir make an interesting pairing with the soaring highs and lows of classical opera. Imagine a glorious soprano singing "Gun Crazy" Annie Laurie Starr's lines: "I told you I was no good. I didn't kid you, did I? Well, now you know. But I've been kicked around all my life. From now on I'm going to start kicking back." Source: www.wfpl.org

Steven Soderbergh's new film Side Effects is mostly an engine for delivering Very Surprising Plot Twists. A big part of the way it does that is by switching up a kind of movie-of-the-week problem film (the struggles with depression; the pathos of a spouse returning from prison) with noir. So you go from female-friendly melodrama (with a female protagonist) to female-loathing noir (with a male protagonist). Noir and its attendant misogyny aren't really the point, in other words; they're just a byproduct of Soderbergh's rage for cleverness. A side effect, if you will.

Still, as the film makes clear, side effects—even ersatz ones—can matter quite a bit. In this case, a lot of the damage is not so much to the woman in the film as to the male lead, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Banks is supposed to be a caring, talented hard-working psychiatrist, with a loving wife and child.

But then his depressed patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) goes off the rails spectacularly—and everything Banks has worked for collapses. His practice, his professional reputation, even his family disintegrate around him.

Misogyny is, at least, attention. Chandler and noir may loathe women, but at least that means they think women are important. The Last Seduction makes Linda Fiorentino into a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess—but at least she gets to have the fun of being a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess. Side Effects, on the other hand, reaches into noir for its fascinating, deadly women—and then myopically insists that we pledge our allegiance instead to a standard Hollywood male protagonist and his reservoirs of oleaginous self-absorption.

Noir is terrified of feminization and powerful women —which means, in part, that it is able to conceive of, and even perhaps at times to point towards, both of those things. Side Effects, in contrast, borrows some tropes from noir, but they're chewed to nothing in the remorseless grinding of the plot. In the end, we're left, not with noir or with misogyny, but simply with the complacent smirk that signals that once again the good guy who is a guy gets to live happily ever after. Source: www.theatlantic.com